The Problems, which occupy pp. 859-967 of the Berlin Aristotle, have probably been less read and studied than any other treatise in the Aristotelian Corpus; they contain, however, a vast quantity of interesting information on a great variety of subjects, and an enquiry into their composition may be not without interest.

Written from the perspective of philosophy of liberation, this essay holds that the reform of basic human relationships and their cultural instantiation(s) is central to all serious societal change. The essay analyzes naive, mythological, and critical consciousness. It examines how these modes of consciousness are embodied in the health delivery system and then describes areas where practitioners and patients of critical consciousness might work for greater humanization of health care.

Contemporary privacy theories and European discussions about data protection employ the notion of ‘personal information’ to designate their areas of concern. The notion of personal information is demarcated from non-personal information—or just information—indicating that we are dealing with a specific kind of information. However, within privacy scholarship the notion of personal information appears undertheorized, rendering the concept somewhat unclear. We argue that in an age of datafication, protection of personal information and privacy is crucial, making the understanding of what is (...) meant by ‘personal information’ more important than ever. To contribute to this aim, we analyse the conception of personal information and its nature, including the distinction between personal and non-personal information from a philosophy of language perspective. Through analyses of aboutness and relative aboutness we point to challenges related to the demarcation between personal and non-personal information, which may in practice lead to all information being personal. (shrink)

One staple of living in our information society is having access to the web. Web-connected devices interpret our queries and retrieve information from the web in response. Today’s web devices even purport to answer our queries directly without requiring us to comb through search results in order to find the information we want. How do we know whether a web device is trustworthy? One way to know is to learn why the device is trustworthy by inspecting its inner workings, 156–170 (...) 1995; Humphreys 2004, Episteme, 6, 221–229 2009). But ordinary users of web devices cannot inspect their inner workings because of their scale, complexity, and the corporate secrecy which enshrouds both the procedures by which the devices operate and the companies that make them. Further piling on this predicament, authors have criticized web technology on the grounds that the invisibility of the web devices’ inner workings prevents users from critically assessing the procedures that produce a given output, in some cases, barring users from fulfilling their epistemic responsibilities, 343–355 2010; Miller and Record Episteme, 10, 117–134 2013). I consider four broad kinds of reasons which we can acquire without inspecting the inner workings of black-boxed technology: individual understanding, expert testimony, testing through experience, and social vetting; and show how each is a viable method of appraising black-boxed technology. By deploying these methods, we can remain responsible inquirers while nonetheless benefitting from today’s epistemic resources on the web. (shrink)

Objectives: The aim of this study is to evaluate the views of cancer patients on patient rights in the context of the right to information and autonomy according to articles related to the issue in the “Patient Rights Regulation”. Methods: The research was conducted among cancer patients in the medical oncology department of a research and practice hospital using a random sampling method between June and September 2005. Data were collected during face-to-face interviews using a questionnaire. Results: There was a (...) high rate of positive response to the items that the patients have the right to be informed (86.5%), that the physician should inform the patient on the diagnosis and the treatment (92.3%) and that the physician is obliged to inform the patient (76.9%). Only 43.3% of the patients stated that the patient has the right to refuse the treatment recommended by the physician. The participants mostly agreed that the patient should participate in decisions about the treatment and that patient consent should be given (78.8%). Conclusions: There are extensive efforts in Turkey towards making patient rights a significant supportive component of health services. For patient rights to become a natural part of medical practice it is necessary to give priority to education of both patients and physicians about patient rights and to lay emphasis on an ethical approach in the patient–physician relationship. (shrink)

An introductory work on the various school of Indian philosophy.

Smysl zhizni -- Statʹi raznykh let : Staryĭ i novyĭ nat︠s︡ionalʹnyĭ messianizm. Umozrenie v kraskakh. Dva mira v drevnerusskoĭ ikonopisi. "Inoe t︠s︡arstvo" i ego iskateli v russkoĭ narodnoĭ skazke.

This chapter addresses the following questions: What would a Levinasian autobiography look like? Is such a thing imaginable? The question is directed in the first instance at autobiography, as a question concerning its ability to go beyond the representation of the subject to write the encounter with the absolute other for which Levinas's ethical philosophy calls. But it is also, in the second instance, a question for Levinas, concerning the potential of autobiography to represent an alterity perhaps not fully accounted (...) for by his philosophy. It is argued that while Levinas helps us to read the crisis in the subject in autobiographical language insofar as it implies the human other, he does not tell us about the extreme responsibility we find in De Quincey. With absolute hospitality, De Quincey gives his I over to alterity without limitation or reserve, in a scene of swearing away or addiction. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: Correspondence: Letters 2665-3286 by E. S. de Beer. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Power has been studied in various guises in both the social cognition and the reasoning literatures. In this paper, three experiments are reported in which this factor was investigated in the domain of deontic thinking. Power of source of deontic statements was varied within several scenarios, and participants judged the degree to which they thought an injunction would be carried out. In the first experiment, permission statements were used, and it was found that, as predicted, power was positively related to (...) degree of endorsement of deontic conclusions across scenarios. In the second experiment, these findings were generalised across three further deontic domains (threat, warning, and promise) and two different syntactic forms (conjunctive and disjunctive). In the third experiment, the hypothesis that power effects were mediated by subjective judgements of conditional probability was investigated and confirmed. It is argued that these results favour theories that give a general role to probabilistic factors, rather than those based on domain-specific schemas. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: Correspondence: Letters 3287-3648 by E. S. de Beer. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.